2.4 – The Isos Network

The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe are leaving Earth after having successfully defeated a Cyberman invasion… The Cyber-fleet is still exploding… But something is escaping through the mass of vaporising debris.

In hot pursuit, the Doctor and his friends find themselves drawn to a mysterious planet where strange beasts slither through the streets of a deserted city… And an old enemy lurks beneath the streets.

As a force of heavily-armed aliens arrives, a battle to save the entire galaxy from invasion begins.

1 Comment

Styre
on May 10, 2016 at 2:03 AM

THE EARLY ADVENTURES: THE ISOS NETWORK

The second series of Early Adventures wraps up with “The Isos Network” from Nicholas Briggs, a direct sequel to “The Invasion” that captures absolutely none of what made the TV story so good. As with so many other stories of similar vintage, there isn’t anything particularly terrible about “The Isos Network,” but “boring and uninspiring” sums it up quite well.

I’m still unsure of the purpose of the Early Adventures. Cynically, I understand that they serve as an excuse to slap the faces of Hartnell and Troughton on CD covers to sell more copies, but creatively I’m not sure. The Companion Chronicles were also an excuse to tell stories featuring unavailable Doctors, but those rapidly became a strong creative exercise, with many releases taking full advantage of the narrative format to tell imaginative, ambitious stories. With the Early Adventures returning to a conventional narrative style, the ambition seems to be absent as well (unless they’re written by Simon Guerrier). I’m not sure how sales are going, but I’m shocked that they haven’t yet announced a year-round monthly release schedule for these; why grind out four stories a year when you could be grinding out twelve?

I suppose I should discuss the story, but you know what I’m going to say. The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe travel to a planet that served as the staging area for the Invasion from the season 6 story. Thousands of Cyber-conversion chambers standing empty, their occupants long since destroyed in the failed Earth campaign. This is a cool image, but what opportunities does it afford for storytelling? Perhaps a character piece, with the Doctor and his companions dealing with the fallout from their recent adventure? How about an exploration of a society rebuilding its tattered remains after the Cybermen departed? But no, Briggs takes the most obvious route: there are still some Cybermen left over that must be defeated. There’s a hard-bitten group of soldiers, there’s a doomsday device that threatens to destroy everything, and the Doctor and companions run around for 2 hours foiling the evil Cyber-plot. Oh, and they ride on giant slugs for a while. And there’s a partially converted person struggling to maintain his identity in the face of Cyber-control.

Wait a minute, doesn’t this sound familiar? Didn’t we just do this in Briggs’ “Return to Telos?” (Or Alan Barnes’ “Last of the Cybermen?”) Well, yes. It’s bad enough that Big Finish is turning into a generic Doctor Who assembly line, but releasing the same story from the same author twice in under a year is really pushing things beyond the bounds of reason. Oh, but that was in the Fourth Doctor Adventures and this is in the Early Adventures, so that makes everything okay, or something. At least in that story you had Tom Baker in the lead role; here you’ve got Frazer Hines and his one-note Troughton impression leading yet again to long scenes of Hines talking to himself. It’s the same complaint as usual: the impression, while very effective with limited deployment in the Companion Chronicles, isn’t convincing enough to support a central character over a two-hour story, and it distracts from the story rather than enhancing it.

The narrative, incidentally, is clunky and obvious, but then that’s no surprise because Briggs is not a capable prose author (see also “The Dalek Generation”). Briggs directs, and it’s fine, though it doesn’t help the snail’s (slug’s?) pace of the story. The sound design from Toby Hrycek-Robinson is good, if unremarkable. But I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to take away from this. If I’m supposed to be inspired, the story failed. If I’m supposed to enjoy myself, the story failed. If I’m supposed to think “Yep, that was certainly a four-part Doctor Who story!” then I guess the story succeeded, but that’s not exactly an inspiring goal.